Sydney Ideas co-presented with the Sydney Democracy Network

Professor Loukas Tsoukalis, Professor of European Integration at the University of Athens and President of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP)

Europe and the European project were hit by successive crises in recent years, which had a cumulative effect, morphing into an existential crisis for regional integration as a whole. Does the European Union suffer from overstretch? Was the creation of the euro a terrible mistake that is now almost impossible to undo, or is the European project just the victim of collateral damage caused by globalisation and the technological revolution?

We first need to understand what went wrong in recent years. But we also need to understand what keeps the Union together in times of big crisis and against the predictions of all kinds of doomsayers. True, the UK has decided to leave, but no other country is looking for the exit to the apparent disappointment of President Trump. Will the more favourable economic and political environment lead to a new relaunching of European integration?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Loukas Tsoukalis has taught in universities in Europe and North America, including Oxford, LSE, Sciences Po in Paris, Athens, College of the Europe, European University Institute in Florence and SAIS Johns Hopkins. He is the author of many books and articles on European integration and international political economy. He has advised the former President of the European Commission and the former President of the European Council.

He is the president of Greece’s leading think tank the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy ELIAMEP. His latest book In Defence of Europe: Can the European Project Be Savedwas published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Last year, he was visiting professor at the Kennedy School, Harvard University and received the Légion d’honneur of the French Republic for his contribution.

Event Details

This paper studies the user experience of the experts who are invited to participate in the EIP surveys. The EIP questionnaire already includes a question about the difficulty of the questions . Although the distribution of the collected responses is encouraging, we have to deal with two problems: i) this distribution is based on the users who have completed the questionnaire (i.e. we do not know the responses of the experts who have dropped out of the survey before answering to this question) and ii) when experts answer that they have faced difficulties, we do not know which questions were difficult for them. To build a deeper understanding about the EIP questionnaire, this paper uses web survey paradata: User agent is used to identify experts responding to the survey using a smartphone. Item response times and drop-out points are used to identify the most difficult questions. The paper concludes with an overall evaluation of the EIP questionnaire and suggestions to improve the user experience for the EIP survey respondents.

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Join us for the launch of the latest Lowy Institute Paper published by Penguin Random House, Remaking the Middle East: How a Troubled Region May Save Itself, by Anthony Bubalo.
The Middle

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Join us for the launch of the latest Lowy Institute Paper published by Penguin Random House, Remaking the Middle East: How a Troubled Region May Save Itself, by Anthony Bubalo.

The Middle East is experiencing a period of concentrated turmoil unlike anything since the end of the Second World War. Uprisings, coups, and wars have seen governments overthrown, hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced.

Anthony Bubalo argues that the current tumult is the result of the irrevocable decay of the nizam – the system under which most states in the region are ruled. But amid the ferment there are also “green shoots” of change which could remake the Middle East in ways that are more inclusive, more democratic, less corrupt, and less violent.

Anthony Bubalo has worked on the Middle East for more than 25 years as a diplomat, intelligence analyst, and researcher. He has lived in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. He led the Lowy Institute’s Middle East research for 14 years, and regularly comments on the region’s politics in the Australian and international media.

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Abstract
Exile is most often associated with situations of banishment and diasporic communities. The concept has also been deployed metaphorically to signal large-scale social processes of ontological disembedding and associated paradoxical

Event Details

Abstract

Exile is most often associated with situations of banishment and diasporic communities. The concept has also been deployed metaphorically to signal large-scale social processes of ontological disembedding and associated paradoxical workings at the level of subjectivity. Under contemporary conditions experiences of exile acquire new ambiguities and intensities. Physical separation often cleaves apart from other possible modes of interaction. Related destabilisations in place-based relationships give rise to intensified memory work and newly reflexive subjectivities. Close attention to one Central Australian Aboriginal woman’s situation provides an intimate perspective from which to observe the conjunction of social forces at work in contemporary processes of displacement. Single-person focused ethnography conveys the gruelling experience of navigating exile and the imagined possible selves and lives this condition generates, offers and ultimately withholds.

About the speaker

Melinda Hinkson is an associate professor of anthropology and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. Much of her work is pursued at the interface between anthropology and visual cultural studies. She has published widely on Warlpiri media production and mediated relations, on the work of Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner, and on the contested cultural politics of the Northern Territory Intervention. Melinda’s 2014 book Remembering the Future: Warlpiri Life through the Prism of Drawing was accompanied by an exhibition she curated for the National Museum of Australia. Her current work focuses on the governance of Indigenous difference and on transformations in Warlpiri relations to place.